TBR News August 23, 2017

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C., August 23 2017:”What appears at first glance to be a spontaneous flood of public disapproval of Trump is actually carefully planned by a very small group of people, all very left of center, and executed by their paid minions.

In addition to mob scenes, carefully and thoroughly covered in the controlled press, we have an endless series of harassing articles in the same press, damning everything Trump does. None of this is spontaneous and all of it scripted.

The far left that wanted Hillary in the White House, are trying to take their revenge on the man who defeated her and to so upset the general public that they would gratefully welcome a far left government.

Who the puppet masters have in mind to run the county, aside from themselves, is not known.

There are very few qualified personages today in the American political scene that have the ability to overcome the massive unemployment, enormous national debt and other very serious sociological problems.

Perhaps they can get Charles Manson out of jail and put him into the Oval Office.

Lenin has been dead and stuffed for years so he’s out.”

 

Table of Contents

• Report: FBI admits their informants participated in deadly Charlottesville riots
• Trump unshackled: President defends Charlottesville response at raucous rally
• Top 10 Reasons George Soros Is Dangerous
• Germany repatriates gold reserves ahead of schedule
• Mnuchin’s Fort Knox Quip: ‘I Assume the Gold Is Still There’
• ‘Too many soldiers to feed’: North Koreans fear more sanctions as drought threatens famine
• Alaska’s Permafrost Is Thawing
• Erdogan and the enemies of Turkey
• Communist Front groups in America
• The Mini-Skirt Deception: How McMaster Got His Afghan ‘Surge’

 Report: FBI admits their informants participated in deadly Charlottesville riots

by Jay Syrmopoulos –

August 22, 2017

Intellihub

According to a bombshell report, FBI sources said they have already identified several federal informants who participated in the mob-like riots in Charlottesville

FBI sources have confirmed that it’s extremely unlikely that leaders of the radical white nationalist and Antifa groups that squared off in violent clashes in Charlottesville, VA will face prosecution due to their being federal law enforcement assets.

According to an exclusive report by True Pundit:

FBI said they have already identified several federal informants who participated in the mob-like riots over the weekend in Virginia. The FBI is also now working those sources to piece together the events from Charlottesville, sources said.

But FBI agents have deemed the newly-minted investigation dicey, having to navigate separate agreements with embedded intelligence assets while trying to pinpoint responsibility for the violence.

Late Saturday, the Justice Department announced the federal probe. The investigation, spearheaded by the Richmond, VA FBI field office, was launched after an Ohio man drove his car through a crowd of demonstrators killing one woman and injuring dozens.

The FBI has Intel assets implanted in several white supremacy sects, as well as the radical ANTIFA group, according to federal law enforcement sources who spoke to True Pundit.

The FBI sources said it is unlikely an asset would be charged for stoking violence in Virginia if for instance that asset had or was providing valuable information on another domestic terrorism case.

“We wouldn’t do a solid informant for this,” one FBI insider said.

The word “do” here pertains to indict.

The report indicates that intelligence assets from the FBI have infiltrated the full spectrum of radical groups, and unless the crimes committed by them rose to an extreme level, such as police officers being killed as part of the demonstrations, they would likely not be charged.

The FBI source used the example of the two Virginia State Police troopers who died after they lost control of a State Police helicopter which was leaving Charlottesville, according to NTSB records, as an example of what type of incident would rise to the level such that an embedded intelligence asset would blow their cover for a prosecution.

Even more harrowing perhaps is the revelations that an FBI initiative called PATCON, or Patriot Conspiracy, has been in place since the late 80’s. This was a long-term provocation campaign in which the Bureau sought “to infiltrate and incite the militia and evangelical Christians to violence so that the Department of Justice could crush them,” explains Salt Lake City attorney, Jesse Trentadue, whose brother was killed while in federal custody shortly after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Trentadue has worked diligently to expose a vast cover-up of the OKC bombing, and the FBI’s intentional efforts to protect the likely federal asset, “John Doe II,” a dark-haired, heavy-set man seen by dozens of people in the company of Timothy McVeigh on the day of the bombing — who the FBI claims doesn’t exist. Through his investigation, Trentadue learned that exposing the identity of this likely FBI informant was crucial to obtain justice for his murdered brother.

Trentadue maintains that there is a “strong possibility” that the long-suppressed video recordings captured McVeigh in the company of a second person who would be identifiable as “an FBI undercover operative.”

“Ruby Ridge was a PATCON operation,” Trentadue has pointed out. “Waco was a PATCON operation. And so, too, I believe, was the Oklahoma City Bombing.”

“The reason [the FBI] doesn’t want that tape released is … that one of the people getting out of that truck on the morning of April 19, 1995, was working for the FBI,” Trentadue said in an interview with Lew Rockwell.

“The FBI had, I now know, at least five or six undercover operatives linked in with McVeigh in Elohim City. What I don’t know is the motivation behind the bombing…. What is not clear is whether it was a sting operation gone bad, that the plan was to stop it but the FBI failed, or else they wanted it to happen, as horrible as that sounds…. It’s clear that they facilitated the bombing, directly or indirectly. It’s clear they didn’t stop it.”

According to the late William Grigg, writing for Pro Liberate:

The same is probably true of the little-remembered October 1995 sequel to the OKC Bombing – thederailment of the Sunset Limited, an Amtrak train carrying 248 passengers. Sleeping car attendant Mitchell Bates was killed and 78 others were injured when four of the train’s 12 cars careened off a 30-foot trestle.

Interestingly, Eric Holder actually oversaw the team that handled these government sponsored terror fomenters prior to serving as U.S. Attorney General.

Make no mistake, the FBI recruits assets to infiltrate radical groups and then attempts to use these assets to push people over the edge. They work to compromise innocent people engaged in fearful conduct, like buy illegal guns — re: Ruby Ridge and Waco.

These types of operations are critical to moving along the police state agenda, whereby people willing give away liberty, freedom, privacy, etc. in the name of being kept safe by the government. It’s an ingenious plan that essentially creates fear within the population by fomenting phony threats or magnifying the threat a group presents exponentially. Through this PATCON program, the feds learned how to ever expand the control state with endless funding.

Jesse Trentadue’s efforts to find out why his brother was killed exposed what happened in OKC and much about this insidious program through twenty plus years of relentless litigation through FOIA.

One FBI insider told True Pundit that the Bureau is somewhat handcuffed in an investigation like this. How can you charge someone who might be linked, the FBI insider asked, when you’ve been paying them for months or longer?

Given the facts related to PATCON, it seems plausible that violence seen in Charlottesville is simply the continuation of the FBI’s long-running divide and conquer fear operation, and not nearly as spontaneous or organic as the mainstream media would have you believe.

 

Trump unshackled: President defends Charlottesville response at raucous rally

August 22, 2017

by Jeff Mason and Keith Coffman

Reuters

PHOENIX (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump revved up supporters on Tuesday with a defense of his response to a white supremacist-organized rally in Virginia and a promise to shut down the U.S. government if necessary to build a wall along the border with Mexico.

Under fire for saying “both sides” were to blame for the violence between white supremacists and left-wing counter protesters in Virginia on Aug. 12, Trump accused television networks of ignoring his calls for unity in the aftermath.

“I didn’t say I love you because you’re black, or I love you because you’re white,” Trump said. “I love all the people of our country.”

Police used pepper spray to disperse crowds after protesters threw rocks and bottles outside the convention center where Trump spoke, police said.

Trump, who often uses news organizations as a foil, repeatedly singled out the media for criticism of how it covered the violence in the Virginia college town of Charlottesville and the resulting political fallout.

“These are truly dishonest people. They’re bad people. I really think they don’t like our country,” Trump said. “The only people giving a platform to these hate groups is the media.”

Adopting a glib tone, Trump said many reporters ignored his condemnation of white supremacists, including the Ku Klux Klan.

“I hit ’em with neo-Nazi, I hit ’em with everything … KKK? We have KKK. I got ’em all,” he said.

James Clapper, a former director of U.S. national intelligence, expressed concern at Trump’s performance, calling it “downright scary and disturbing.”

“I question his fitness to be in office,” Clapper told CNN.

GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

Funding for the border wall has flagged in the U.S. Congress as many lawmakers question whether Trump’s main promise during the 2016 presidential election campaign is really necessary.

But with a budget battle looming, Trump said he would be willing to risk a politically damaging government shutdown in order to secure funding for the wall.

 

Top 10 Reasons George Soros Is Dangerous

Human Events

1. Gives billions to left-wing causes: Soros started the Open Society Institute in 1993 as a way to spread his wealth to progressive causes. Using Open Society as a conduit, Soros has given more than $7 billion to a who’s who of left-wing groups.  This partial list of recipients of Soros’ money says it all: ACORN, Apollo Alliance, National Council of La Raza, Tides Foundation, Huffington Post, Southern Poverty Law Center, Soujourners, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, and the National Organization for Women.

2 .Influence on U.S. elections:  Soros once said that removing President George W. Bush from office in 2004 was the “central focus of my life.”  He put his money where his mouth is, giving $23.58 million to various 527 groups dedicated to defeating Bush.  His early financial support helped jump-start Barack Obama’s political career.  Soros hosted a 2004 fund-raiser for Obama when he was running for the Illinois Senate and gave the maximum-allowed contribution within hours of Obama’s announcement that he was running for President.

3. Wants to curtail American sovereignty: Soros would like nothing better than for America to become subservient to international bodies. He wants more power for groups such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, even while saying the U.S. role in the IMF should be “downsized.”  In 1998, he wrote:  “Insofar as there are collective interests that transcend state boundaries, the sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions.”
4. Media Matters: Soros is a financial backer of Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog group that hyperventilates over any conservative view that makes it into the mainstream media. Now its founder, David Brock, has openly declared war on Fox News, telling Politico that the group was mounting “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” against the cable news channel, and would try to disrupt the commercial interests of owner Rupert Murdoch—an odd mission for a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt educational foundation that is barred from participating in partisan political activity.
5. 5. MoveOn.org: Soros has been a major funder of MoveOn.org, a progressive advocacy group and political action committee that raises millions for liberal candidates. This is the group that had on its website an ad comparing President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler and ran the infamous “General Betray Us” ad in the New York Times, disparaging the integrity of Gen. David Petraeus.
6. Center for American Progress: Headed by John Podesta, White House chief of staff under President Clinton, the Center for American Progress has been instrumental in providing progressive talking points and policy positions for the Obama administration. There has also been a revolving door between the White House and the Soros-funded think tank, with Obama staffing his administration with many CAP officials.
7. Environmental extremism: Former Obama green jobs czar Van Jones and his leftist environmental ideas have been funded by Soros’ money at these groups: the Ella Baker Center, Green For All, the Center for American Progress, and the Apollo Alliance, which was instrumental in getting $110 billion in green initiatives included in Obama’s stimulus package. Soros also funds the Climate Policy Initiative to address global warming and gave Friends of the Earth money to “integrate a climate equity perspective in the presidential transition.”
8. America Coming Together: Soros gave nearly $20 million to this 527 group with the express purpose of defeating President Bush. A massive get-out-the-vote effort, ACT’s door-to-door canvassing teams included numerous felons, its voter registration drives were riddled with fraud, and it handed out incendiary fliers and made misleading taped phone calls to voters. ACT was fined $775,000 by the Federal Election Commission for violations of various federal campaign finance laws.
9. Currency manipulation: A large part of Soros’ multibillion-dollar fortune has come from manipulating currencies. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad accused him of bringing down the nation’s currency through his trading activities, and in Thailand he was called an “economic war criminal.”  Known as “The Man who Broke the Bank of England,” Soros initiated a British financial crisis by dumping 10 billion sterling, forcing the devaluation of the currency and gaining a billion-dollar profit.
10. Delusions: Soros has repeatedly said that he sees himself as a messianic figure. Who but a megalomaniac would make these comments?  “I admit that I have always harbored an exaggerated view of my self-importance—to put it bluntly, I fancied myself as some kind of god” or “I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise I might end up in the loony bin.”  If only the loony bin were an option.  As it is, one of the wealthiest men in the world is using his billions to impose a radical agenda on America.

 

Germany repatriates gold reserves ahead of schedule

Germany’s central bank has completed an initiative to bring half of the country’s gold reserves home three years ahead of schedule, as it repatriated all of its gold kept in Paris and a third of its reserves in the US.

August 23, 2017

DW

The Frankfurt-based Bundesbank said that half of Germany’s 3,378 tons of gold had been brought home from New York, London and Paris, where it had been stashed for many decades to avoid it falling into the hands of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

In a recent shipment, some 374 tons of the metal, 11 percent of the German stock, left the vaults at the Bank of France, while 300 tons had been removed from the Federal Reserve in New York to the Bundesbank vaults in Frankfurt, board member Carl-Ludwig Thiele told journalists.

“We’ve checked every ingot against authenticity, fineness and weight. We have nothing to complain about,” Thiele said, adding that the secret shipments were finished three years ahead of schedule and at a cost of some 7.7 million euros ($9.1 million). Under the gold repatriation plan announced in 2013, Germany originally envisaged bringing home half of its reserves by 2020.

Germany holds the world’s second-largest gold reserves after the United States, at 3,378 tons or 270,000 ingots of around 12 kilograms each. The amount has a market value of around 120 billion euros. Some 1,710 tons – or 50.6 percent – are now kept in Frankfurt, while 1,236 tons remain in New York and 432 in London.

Financial crisis jitters

New York was a favored location as home of the world’s most vital currency, the US dollar, while London’s deep gold market could allow the metal to be quickly converted into cash in an emergency.

The share of Germany’s cache in France was built up during the decades of the country’s post-World War Two economic miracle, when the Bundesbank converted the country’s trade surpluses with its neighbor into gold stored in the Parisian vaults of the Banque de France.

But in the wake of the US subprime crisis and the emergence of the eurozone debt crisis in 2012, euroskeptic voices in Germany began pressing for an audit of the precious metal kept abroad.

They had suspected the gold might have been tampered with, lent out or sold off. The Bundesbank responded to the calls for greater transparency by agreeing to bring a larger share home. On Wednesday, the central bank said that further repatriations were not planned.

 

Mnuchin’s Fort Knox Quip: ‘I Assume the Gold Is Still There’

August 21, 2017

by Saleha Mohsin and Alister Bull

Bloomberg

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin paid a rare official visit to Fort Knox to check out the nation’s gold stash on Monday — while keeping an open mind for future film projects.

“I assume the gold is still there,” the former Hollywood producer quipped to an audience in Louisville, Kentucky, 40 miles (64 km) north of the U.S. Bullion Depository. “It would really be quite a movie if we walked in and there was no gold.” After the visit, he playfully reassured Americans the treasure was still secure.

“Glad gold is safe!” he wrote in a post on Twitter.

Fort Knox has been seared into the public imagination since the 1964 James Bond movie “Goldfinger,” in which the British spy, played by Sean Connery, foiled a plot to contaminate the nation’s bullion.

Mnuchin, whose action-film credits include ‘‘Mad Max: Fury Road,” “The Lego Batman Movie” and “Suicide Squad,” said that he would be only the third secretary of the Treasury to go inside the vault since it was created in 1936 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

“We have approximately $200 billion of gold at Fort Knox,” said Mnuchin. “The last time anybody went in to see the gold, other than the Fort Knox people, was in 1974 when there was a congressional visit. And the last time it was counted was actually in 1953.”

 

‘Too many soldiers to feed’: North Koreans fear more sanctions as drought threatens famine

Plight of ordinary people being overlooked amid focus on missile launches and rising tensions between Pyongyang and Washington

August 23, 2017

by Justin McCurry in Osaka

The Guardian

Sanctions and the worst drought for almost two decades threaten to cause severe hardship for millions of people in North Korea, while the country’s leadership continues to plough scarce resources into its missile and nuclear programmes, according to UN agencies and those with contacts in the impoverished nation.

A drought that ravaged crops earlier this summer will leave the North unable to properly feed many of its people, including soldiers in the country’s million-strong army, the groups have warned.

While living standards have improved for some North Koreans under Kim Jong-un’s leadership, many of the country’s 25 million people face a struggle to secure enough food while others risk losing their jobs due to sanctions, according to Jiro Ishimaru, a Japanese documentary maker who runs a network of citizen journalists inside North Korea.

“For one thing, there are too many soldiers to feed,” Ishimaru, whose contacts are equipped with contraband mobile phones, told the Guardian at his Asia Press office in the western Japanese city of Osaka.

“And corruption is rife, so that by the time senior military officers have taken their share of food provisions to sell for profit on the private market, there is next to nothing left for ordinary soldiers.”

Ishimaru, who spoke to several contacts about living conditions in North Korea from the Chinese border earlier this month, added: “One of them told me that there was talk of war with the US, but that many North Korean soldiers are in poor physical condition and in no fit state to fight.”

Ishimaru fears the focus on missile launches and rising tensions between Pyongyang and Washington means the plight of ordinary North Koreans is being overlooked.

“This is exactly what Kim Jong-un wants – to project an image of strength, that he and the people are one and the same. In an ordinary country there would be riots over the food shortages, but not in North Korea.”

The state’s inability to provide has spawned a private market in food and Chinese-made clothes that is tolerated, if not encouraged, by officials. “The authorities allow it to continue because they know the state would collapse otherwise,” he added.

The UN, concerned about the prospect of widespread malnutrition and other illnesses after the country suffered its worst drought since 2001, has approved $6.3m in aid to help it cope with shortages of corn, rice, maize, potatoes and other essential crops.

The Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the ruling Workers’ party of Korea, reported that “prevention battles” had been launched to counter an “abysmal drought” that began in May according to the NK News website.

In a special alert last month, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimated North Korea’s early-season crop production was down almost a third from the same period last year.

“More rains are urgently needed to avoid significant decreases in the main 2017 cereal production season,” the report said. “Should drought conditions persist, the food security situation is likely to further deteriorate.”

It added: “Most of the country’s population is critically dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods. At this point, it is vital that farmers receive appropriate and timely agricultural input assistance.”

UN officials are determined to prevent a repeat of a famine in the mid-1990s that, according to some estimates, killed as many as one million North Koreans.

Ishimaru, who last week witnessed “clearly undernourished” soldiers washing their uniforms in the Yalu river near the Chinese border, said: “The drought, combined with sanctions, will take the North Korean economy in a dangerous direction by next spring. This is a time of real hardship for ordinary people.”

As Kim and Donald Trump traded verbal blows over Pyongyang’s missile tests, reports emerged of public discontent towards the regime’s focus on weapons development.

Soon after North Korea successfully launched a Hwasong-14 ICBM late last month, some residents in the country’s North Pyongan province questioned the wisdom of inviting more international reprisals by testing ballistic missiles.

The Daily NK website quoted a source in North Korea as saying that some residents felt “disillusioned by the Kim Jong-un regime, which spends more money on developing missiles than improving their livelihoods”.

The anonymous source added: “Everyone is aware that whenever the regime launches a missile, economic sanctions will follow. There’s nothing to celebrate for ordinary citizens. In the beginning, the residents were proud of the regime openly opposing the US with nuclear development and missiles, but these days, anti-US sentiment has weakened, while respect for the regime has plummeted.”

New UN sanctions that aim to slash by a third North Korea’s $3bn annual export revenue risk creating an extra layer of misery for ordinary North Koreans.

The measures are expected to threaten export-dependent jobs, including those at Musan mine, the country’s biggest producer of iron ore. The ban on seafood exports will hit fishermen whose livelihoods depend on selling part of their catch to China.

Alaska’s Permafrost Is Thawing

The loss of frozen ground in Arctic regions is a striking result o fclimate change. And it is also a cause of more warming to come.

August. 23, 2017

by Henry Fountain

The New York Times

YUKON DELTA NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Alaska — The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as other parts of the planet, and even here in sub-Arctic Alaska the rate of warming is high. Sea ice and wildlife habitat are disappearing; higher sea levels threaten coastal native villages.

But to the scientists from Woods Hole Research Center who have come here to study the effects of climate change, the most urgent is the fate of permafrost, the always-frozen ground that underlies much of the state.

Starting just a few feet below the surface and extending tens or even hundreds of feet down, it contains vast amounts of carbon in organic matter — plants that took carbon dioxide from the atmosphere centuries ago, died and froze before they could decompose. Worldwide, permafrost is thought to contain about twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere.

Once this ancient organic material thaws, microbes convert some of it to carbon dioxide and methane, which can flow into the atmosphere and cause even more warming. Scientists have estimated that the process of permafrost thawing could contribute as much as 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit to global warming over the next several centuries, independent of what society does to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels and other activities.

In Alaska, nowhere is permafrost more vulnerable than here, 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle, in a vast, largely treeless landscape formed from sediment brought down by two of the state’s biggest rivers, the Yukon and the Kuskokwim. Temperatures three feet down into the frozen ground are less than half a degree below freezing. This area could lose much of its permafrost by midcentury.

That, said Max Holmes, senior scientist and deputy director of the research center, “has all kinds of consequences both locally for this region, for the animals and the people who live here, as well as globally.”

“It’s sobering to think of this magnificent landscape and how fundamentally it can change over a relatively short time period,” he added.

But on this wide, flat tundra, it takes a practiced eye to see how Alaska is thawing from below.

At one of the countless small lakes that pepper the region, chunks of shoreline that include what had been permafrost have calved off toward the water.

Nearby, across a spongy bed of mosses and lichens, a small boggy depression likely formed when the ice in the top layers of the permafrost below it melted to water.

In July, the Woods Hole scientists, along with 13 undergraduate and graduate students working on projects of their own, set up a temporary field station on a nameless lake 60 miles northwest of Bethel, which with a population of 6,000 is the largest town in the region. They drilled permafrost cores with a power auger, took other sediment and water samples and embedded temperature probes in the frozen ground. Later, back in the lab at Woods Hole, they began the process of analyzing the samples for carbon content and nutrients.

The goal is to better understand how thawing permafrost affects the landscape and, ultimately, how much and what mix of greenhouse gases is released.

“In order to know how much is lost, you have to know how much is there,” said Sue Natali, a Woods Hole scientist and permafrost expert.

Even in colder northern Alaska, where permafrost in some parts of the North Slope extends more than 2,100 feet below the surface, scientists are seeing stark changes. Vladimir E. Ramonovsky, a permafrost researcher at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, said that temperatures at a depth of 65 feet have risen by 3 degrees Celsius (about 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit) over decades.

Near-surface changes have been even greater. At one northern site, he said, permafrost temperatures at shallow depths have climbed from minus 8 degrees Celsius to minus 3.

“Minus 3 is not that far from zero,” Dr. Romanovsky said. If emissions and warming continue at the same rate, he said, near-surface temperatures will rise above freezing around the middle of the century.

There is plenty of debate among scientists about when and how much of Alaska’s permafrost will thaw. And there is no doubt that thawing of the full depth of permafrost would take millenniums.

But Dr. Romanovsky said that his and others’ work shows that permafrost “is not as stable as people thought.”

In addition to greenhouse gas emissions, thawing wreaks havoc on infrastructure, causing slumping of land when ice loses volume as it turns to water.

The main road in Bethel, where average temperatures have risen about 4 degrees Fahrenheit since the mid-20th century, is more of a washboard than a thoroughfare because of shifting ground. Building foundations in Bethel move and crack as well. Some roads, airport runways and parking areas have to be reinforced with liquid-filled pipes that transfer heat out of the permafrost to keep the ground from slumping.

The thawing of permafrost is a gradual process. Ground is fully frozen in winter, and begins to thaw from the top down as air temperatures rise in spring. As average temperatures increase over years, this thawed, or active, layer can increase in depth.

At the field station, the researchers are especially interested in how wildfires affect the permafrost. Because burning removes some of the vegetation that acts as insulation, the theory is that burning should cause permafrost to thaw more.

Parts of the tundra here burned in the 1970s and in the summer of 2015, so the researchers took cores from both burned and unburned areas. Scientists wrestled with the bulky power auger as its stainless steel tube worked its way into the hard permafrost. Cores — often containing thin layers of solid ice — were labeled, packed in a cooler and sent by helicopter to a freezer in Bethel.

Thawing permafrost underneath or at the edge of a lake can cause it to drain like a leaky bathtub. Thawing elsewhere can bring about small elevation changes that can in turn lead to changes in water flow through the landscape, drying out some parts of the tundra and turning others into bogs.

Beyond the local effects on plant and animal life, the landscape changes can have an important climate change impact, by altering the mix of carbon dioxide and methane that is emitted. Although methane does not persist in the atmosphere for as long as carbon dioxide, it has a far greater heat-trapping ability and can contribute to more rapid warming.

So the researchers devote much of their time to studying the flow of water and the carbon and nutrients it contains.

“It’s one of the big questions to tackle – what’s wet and dry now, and what will be wet and dry in the future,” Dr. Natali said. If the decomposing permafrost is wet, there will be less oxygen available to the microbes, so they will produce more methane. If the permafrost is dry, the decomposition will lead to more carbon dioxide.

Estimates vary on how much carbon is currently released from thawing permafrost worldwide, but by one calculation emissions over the rest of the century could average about 1.5 billion tons a year, or about the same as current annual emissions from fossil-fuel burning in the United States.

Already, thawing permafrost and warmer temperatures are being blamed for rising carbon emissions in the Alaskan tundra, both here and farther north. In a study earlier this year, researchers found that bacterial decomposition of thawed permafrost, as well as carbon dioxide produced by living vegetation, continues later into the fall because freezing of the surface is delayed.

The rise in emissions has been so significant, the researchers found, that Alaska may be shifting from a sink, or storehouse, of carbon, to a net source.

Dr. Holmes said that shift was not surprising given the climate trend, and he would expect that sub-Arctic parts of Siberia, Canada and other areas with permafrost may be undergoing similar changes.

“There’s a massive amount of carbon that’s in the ground, that’s built up slowly over thousands and thousands of years,” he said.

“It’s been in a freezer, and that freezer is now turning into a refrigerator.”

Erdogan and the enemies of Turkey

President Erdogan’s verbal tirades seem like a relic of bygone times. But there’s more to them than meets the eye, writes DW’s Kerstin Knipp. The Turkish leader is holding the nation hostage in the myths of history.

August 23, 2017

by Kersten Knipp

DW

As a German, you may get a bit emotional when you listen to the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s verbal attacks. “He does not know his place,” said Erdogan of German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel. “Who do you think you are, talking to the president of Turkey? Speak to my foreign minister!” Tens of thousands of Germans born in the 1960s or 1970s may feel a pang of nostalgia when they hear Erdogan’s words. The president may remind them of the strict high school teachers of yesteryear whose authoritarian attitude was rapidly becoming a thing of the past – even then.

These school teachers thought they could impress their students with their bad temper and force them into submission. Their determination made them blind to the loosening mores of the era. They also showed how little they understood the zeitgeist and they failed to adjust to the new times. These elderly teachers did not notice their anachronistic behavior and you almost felt sorry for them. From the German perspective, the Turkish president’s tantrums are reminiscent of an old-fashioned generation.

The great manipulator

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, however, certainly does not deserve any sympathy. On the contrary, his authoritarian attitude amounts to no less than an attempt at historical manipulation – for example, when he addresses the German chancellor or the foreign minister by first name. He uses displays of loutish behavior to present himself as a strongman, and thus, the protector or father of the Turks. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk did the same, albeit with much better manners. The intentional similarity to Ataturk shows how much Erdogan himself has become ensnared in the pitfalls of history. But Ataturk, Erdogan’s role model and imaginary rival, died almost 80 years ago.

By invoking the Ottoman and thus Islamic heritage of his country, Erdogan clearly wants to dissociate himself from the thoroughly secular Ataturk. But his stubborn reliance on ideology has long dissolved into aesthetic and political triviality, rendering the differences invalid.

What the two statesmen do have in common, however, is their full exploitation of the culture of fear. This has its origins in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, when the West viewed it as the “sick man of Europe.” In light of the rapid decline of power, many Turks at the time developed the sinking feeling that they were surrounded by enemies. The political errors made by the Ottoman Empire led to painful territorial losses, which gave the Turks the feeling that their neighbors were against them. This is when Turkish nationalism was born.

In the chamber of historical myths

The political elites of the country have since then cynically exploited this collective feeling. Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish republic, adopted the nationalist tone that Erdogan uses today. What the two leaders have in common is their willingness to leave their compatriots enchanted by the spell of the past, thus, not allowing them to leave the chamber of the nation’s historical myths.

Self-exaltation has been employed as a means of symbolically compensating for the real loss of power. This may have been excusable in the early years of the republic but a hundred years have passed since then. It has created the poisonous type of nationalistic foundation on which Erdogan is building to help him win his presidential bid in 2019.

There is no price too high for the achievement of this goal. He has no qualms about trapping a part of the Turkish population in the myths of the past. He is prepared to prevent their arrival in the present for the sake of his personal political success. In Germany, Erdogan’s rhetoric may seem ridiculous and hopelessly antiquated, but in Turkey, it hinders cultural and political growth. This is why Erdogan’s reactionary attitude is no longer a laughing matter.

 

Communist Front groups in America

August 23, 2017

by Christian Jürs

Although President Franklin Roosevelt flatly forbade interception of Soviet message transmissions between the United States and Russia, the intelligence agencies involved in these interceptions continually disobeyed him. Membership in these various associations, councils, committees and Soviet-supported groups did not prove that a member was an active communist or a spy. Thousands of individuals of a strong liberal bent joined many of these organizations without being communists or even supporting communist aims. The proliferation of these groups clearly shows how Moscow set a myriad of attractive traps for the unsuspecting or the mildly sympathetic. From this large pool of candidates, Moscow often selected future spies. Many of these individuals were instructed to withdraw from incriminating associations, go underground, become members of conservative groups and even criticize former members.

Post-1948 List of Communist Identified Organizations

Abraham Lincoln Brigade

Abraham Lincoln School, Chicago, Illinois

Action Committee to Free Spain Now

Alabama People’s Educational Association

American Association for Reconstruction in Yugoslavia, Inc.

American Branch of the Federation of Greek Maritime Unions

American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born *

American Committee for Spanish Freedom

American Committee for the Settlement of Jews in Birobidjan, Inc.

American Committee for Yugoslav Relief, Inc.

American Committee to Survey Labor Conditions in Europe

American Committee for a Democratic Greece

American Council on Soviet Relations

American Jewish Labor Council

American League Against War and Fascism

American League for Peace and Democracy

American Peace Crusade

American Peace Mobilization

American Poles for Peace

American Polish Labor Council

American Polish League

American Rescue Ship Mission

American Russian Institute (aka American Russian Institute for Relations

with the Soviet Union)

American Russian Institute, Philadelphia

American Russian Institute of San Francisco

American Russian Institute of Southern California, Los Angeles

American Slav Congress

American Women for Peace

American Youth Congress *

American Youth for Democracy

Armenian Progressive League of America

Benjamin Davis Freedom Committee

Boston School for Marxist Studies, Boston, Massachusetts

Bridges-Robertson-Schmidt Defense Committee

Bulgarian American People’s League of the United States of America

California Emergency Defense Committee

California Labor School, Inc., 321 Divisadero Street, San Francisco, California

Carpatho-Russian People’s Society

Cervantes Fraternal Society

China Welfare Appeal, Inc.

Chopin Cultural Center

Citizens Committee for Harry Bridges

Citizens Committee of the Upper West Side (New York City)

Citizens Committee to Free Earl Browder

Citizens Emergency Defense Committee

Citizens Protective League

Civil Liberties Sponsoring Committee of Pittsburgh

Civil Rights Congress (and its affiliated organizations, including

Civil Rights Congress for Texas)

Veterans Against Discrimination of Civil Rights Congress of New York

Comite Coordinador Pro Republica Espanola

Comite Pro Derechos Civiles

Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy

Committee for Constitutional and Political Freedom

Committee for Peace and Brotherhood Festival in Philadelphia

Committee for the Defense of the Pittsburgh Six

Committee for the Negro in the Arts

Committee for the Protection of the Bill of Rights

Committee for World Youth Friendship and Cultural Exchange

Committee to Abolish Discrimination in Maryland

Committee to Defend the Rights and Freedom of Pittsburgh’s

Political Prisoners

Committee to Uphold the Bill of Rights

Commonwealth College, Mena, Arkansas

Communist Party, USA (its subdivisions, subsidiaries and affiliates)

Communist Political Association (its subdivisions, subsidiaries and affiliates, including:

Alabama People’s Educational Association

Florida Press and Educational League

Oklahoma League for Political Education

People’s Educational and Press Association of Texas

Virginia League for People’s Education)

Congress Against Discrimination

Congress of American Revolutionary Writers

Congress of American Women

Congress of the Unemployed

Connecticut Committee to Aid Victims of the Smith Act

Connecticut State Youth Conference

Council for Jobs, Relief and Housing

Council for Pan-American Democracy

Council of Greek Americans

Council on African Affairs

Daily Worker Press Club

Dennis Defense Committee

Detroit Youth Assembly

East Bay Peace Committee

Emergency Committee to Save Spanish Refugees

Everybody’s Committee to Outlaw War

Families of the Baltimore Smith Act Victims

Families of the Smith Act Victims

Finnish-American Mutual Aid Society

Frederick Douglas Educational Center

Freedom Stage, Inc.

Friends of the Soviet Union

George Washington Carver School, New York City

Harlem Trade Union Council

Hawaii Civil Liberties Committee

Hellenic-American Brotherhood

Hollywood Writers Mobilization for Democracy

Hungarian-American Council for Democracy

Hungarian Brotherhood

Idaho Pension Union

Independent Party, Seattle, Washington

Industrial Workers of the World

International Labor Defense *

International Workers Order (its subdivisions, subsidiaries and affiliates)

Jewish Culture Society

Jewish People’s Committee

Jewish People’s Fraternal Order

Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee

Joseph Weydemeyer School of Social Science, St. Louis, Missouri

Labor Council for Negro Rights

Labor Research Association, Inc.

Labor Youth League

League for Common Sense

League of American Writers

Macedonian-American People’s League

Maritime Labor Committee to Defend Al Lannon

Massachusetts Committee for the Bill of Rights

Massachusetts Minute Women for Peace

Maurice Braverman Defense Committee

Michigan Civil Rights Federation

Michigan Council for Peace

Michigan School of Social Sciences

National Association of Mexican Americans

National Committee for Freedom of the Press

National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners

National Committee to Win Amnesty for Smith Act Victims

National Committee to Win the Peace

National Conference on American Policy in China and the Far East

National Council of American-Soviet Friendship

National Federation for Constitutional Liberties

National Labor Conference for Peace

National Negro Congress

National Negro Labor Council

Nature Friends of America

Negro Labor Victory Committee

New Committee for Publications

North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy

North American Spanish Aid Committee

North Philadelphia Forum

Ohio School of Social Sciences

Oklahoma Committee to Defend Political Prisoners

Pacific Northwest Labor School, Seattle, Washington

Palo Alto Peace Club, Palo Alto, California

Peace Information Center

Peace Movement of Ethiopia

People’s Drama, Inc.

People’s Educational Association (Los Angeles Educational Center)

People’s Institute of Applied Religion

People’s Programs (Seattle, Washington)

People’s Radio Foundation, Inc.

Philadelphia Labor Committee for Negro Rights

Philadelphia School of Social Science and Art

Photo League

Pittsburgh Art Club

Political Prisoners’ Welfare Committee

Polonia Society of the IWO

Proletarian Party of America

Protestant War Veterans of the United States, Inc.

Provisional Committee of Citizens for Peace, Southwest Area

Provisional Committee on Latin American Affairs

Quad City Committee for Peace

Queensborough Tenants League

Revolutionary Workers League

Romanian-American Fraternal Society

Russian American Society, Inc.

Samuel Adams School, Boston, Massachusetts

Santa Barbara Peace Forum, Santa Barbara, California

Schappes Defense Committee

Schneiderman-Darcy Defense Committee

School of Jewish Studies

Seattle Labor School, Seattle, Washington

Serbian-American Fraternal Society

Serbian Vidovidan Council

Slavic Council of Southern California

Slovak Workers Society

Slovenian-American National Council

Socialist Workers Party, including American Committee for European

Workers’ Relief

Southern Negro Youth Congress

Syracuse Women for Peace

Tom Paine School of Westchester, New York

Trade Union Committee for Peace

Trade Unionists for Peace

Tri-State Negro Trade Union Council

Ukranian-American Fraternal Union

Union of New York Veterans

United American Spanish Aid Committee

United Committee of Jewish Societies and Landsmanschaft

United Committee of South Slavic Americans

United Defense Council of Southern California

United Harlem Tenants and Consumers Organization

United May Day Committee

United Negro and Allied Veterans of America

United World Federalists

Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade

Virginia League for People’s Education

Voice of Freedom Committee

Walt Whitman School of Social Science, Newark, New Jersey

Washington Bookshop Association

Washington Committee for Democratic Action

Washington Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights

Washington Commonwealth Federation

Washington Pension Union

Wisconsin Conference on Social Legislation

Workers Alliance

Yiddisher Kultur Farband

Young Communist League

Yugoslav-American Cooperative Home, Inc.

Yugoslav Seamen’s Club, Inc.

The incredible proliferation of Marxist groups was only matched by their choice of misleading titles. The great majority of these entities sprang up after Roosevelt’s election in 1933 and were extremely active during the Second World War. After Roosevelt’s death in 1945, there was a general withering of these groups. With the advent of the Cold War their fortunate demise was certain.

The Mini-Skirt Deception: How McMaster Got His Afghan ‘Surge’

A photo of Soviet era Afghanistan won Trump over

August 23, 2017

by Justin Raimondo

AntiWar

According to reports, Gen. H. R. McMaster convinced President Trump to give up his longstanding opposition to the Afghan war by showing him this photograph, below, of Afghan women in what the media are describing as “miniskirts.” As the Washington Post put it:

“One of the ways McMaster tried to persuade Trump to recommit to the effort was by convincing him that Afghanistan was not a hopeless place. He presented Trump with a black-and-white snapshot from 1972 of Afghan women in miniskirts walking through Kabul, to show him that Western norms had existed there before and could return.”

The irony is that, in 1972, when this photo was taken on the grounds of Kabul University, Afghanistan was firmly in the orbit of the Soviet Union, as it had been since 1953, when Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud Khan rose to power and instituted a series of progressive reforms, including equal rights for women. The next year, Khan deposed King Mohammed Zahir Shah, and Soviet aid poured in, alongside the Red Army.

More irony: it was the United States, alongside Washington’s then-ally Osama bin Laden, that overthrew the communist regime, and conducted a guerrilla war against the Afghan government and their Soviet sponsors. The last Soviet troops left in 1989 — and there were no more miniskirts to be seen anywhere in Afghanistan.

Gen. McMaster knows all this: our President does not. Does McMaster think he can bring communism back to Afghanistan? I jest, but with serious intent. Because the commies attempted what our President has vowed not to do in Afghanistan: they sought to create a nation out of a collection of mountain-guarded valleys, isolated bastions untouched by time or the vaunted ambitions of their many would-be conquerors.

Here is Trump, trying to justify the prolongation of the longest war in our history:

“I am here to talk about tonight, that nearly 16 years after September 11 attacks, after the extraordinary sacrifice of blood and treasure, the American people are weary of war without victory.

“Nowhere is this more evident than with the war in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history – 17 years. I share the American people’s frustration. I also share their frustration over a foreign policy that has spent too much time, energy, money, and most importantly, lives trying to rebuild countries in our own image instead of pursuing our security interests above all other considerations.”

How to reconcile this abjuration of hubris with that photo of mini-skirted Afghan women? It can’t be done, but then again Trump is all about contradictions:

“Shortly after my inauguration, I directed Secretary of Defense Mattis and my national security team to undertake a comprehensive review of all strategic options in Afghanistan and South Asia.

”My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like following my instincts. But all my life, I have heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the oval office. In other words, when you are president of the United States.”

Has such a confession of betrayal ever been uttered by a public figure? For years he told us Afghanistan was a waste of lives and treasure, and that we had to get out. And now he’s flip-flopped because McMaster showed him a photo of Afghan women in mini-skirts! Oh, how easy it was – too easy!

“So I studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle,” he claims. Really? Did he study it enough to realize that no one has ever conquered Afghanistan? Did he contemplate the storied history of that unforgiving land, which caused even Alexander the Great to turn back? Did he study the provenance and context of that photograph, in which Afghan women dared to show their knees?

Of course not!

“After many meetings over many months,” Trump continued,

“[W]e held our final meeting last Friday at Camp David with my cabinet and generals to complete our strategy. I arrived at three fundamental conclusions about America’s core interests in Afghanistan.

“First, our nation must seek an honorable and enduring outcome worthy of the tremendous sacrifices that have been made, especially the sacrifices of lives. The men and women who serve our nation in combat deserve a plan for victory. They deserve the tools they need and the trust they have earned to fight and to win.”

What is the moral meaning of this? That lives wasted in a futile crusade must be matched by yet more sacrifices on the altar of the war god? We are told that Trump met with five enlisted soldiers before making his decision to go along with the generals’ war plan: I’d like to know what they said. The White House won’t tell us.

From this moral inversion Trump descends into an inversion of the facts:

“Second, the consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable. 9/11, the worst terrorist attack in our history, was planned and directed from Afghanistan because that country by a government that gave comfort and shelter to terrorists. A hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorists, including ISIS and al Qaeda, would instantly fill, just as happened before September 11.”

The 9/11 terrorist attacks were planned and directed from Hamburg, Germany, and right here in the United States – indeed, not too far from Mar-a-Lago — not Afghanistan. This “safe haven” argument is so tattered and overused that it comes apart under the most cursory inspection. And what are we to make of someone who describes ending a 16-year war as “a hasty withdrawal”?

We are then treated to the myth of “victory denied in Iraq,” which attributes the rise of ISIS to US withdrawal from Iraq – when it reality ISIS was created by our “ally” Saudi Arabia and the Arab sheikhs of the Gulf states who have funded and encouraged their co-co-religionists in the Sunni-versus-Shi’ite civil war that has sundered the Muslim world. And of course there would be no ISIS if not for the invasion of Iraq – but even Trump knows this quite well.

Drifting off into vague threats against Pakistan, Trump reiterates his determination to solve “big and intricate problems.” But how? How will it be different, this time?

“As a result of our comprehensive review, American strategy in Afghanistan and South Asia will change dramatically in the following ways: A core pillar of our new strategy is a shift from a time-based approach to one based on conditions. I’ve said it many times, how counterproductive it is for the United States to announce in advance the dates we intend to begin or end military operations.

“We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities. Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on. America’s enemies must never know our plans or believe they can wait us out.”

A child could see through this rodomontade. Because unless we intend to stay in Afghanistan forever, what is to prevent the Taliban from simply waiting us out? We have to leave sometime. So what is the purpose of this vow of silence? It is simply to keep the truth from the American people. We won’t know how many troops are in Afghanistan, nor will we know when more are sent in: it’s all to be conducted under the radar, so that Trump’s voters – who took seriously his tirades against foreign wars – won’t know the extent to which he has betrayed his mandate, and them.

The absurdities accumulate like refuse during a garbage strike:

“We are not nation building again. We are killing terrorists.” Yet Gen. McMaster, a disciple of Gen. David Petraeus and his “COINdistas,” are the original nation-builders – aside from the Soviets, that is, from whom they cadged their “strategy.”

“We have been paying Pakistan billions and billions of dollars, at the same time they are housing the same terrorists that we are fighting. But that will have to change. And that will change immediately.” No it won’t. Remember when Sen. Rand Paul tried to end US aid to Pakistan? It didn’t happen then and it won’t happen now.

“As the prime minister of Afghanistan has promised, we are going to participate in economic development to help defray the cost of this war to us.” So Afghanistan is going to pay for this war, just like Mexico is going to pay for the Great Wall of Texas! In your dreams, Mr. President.

“Our commitment is not unlimited, and our support is not a blank check.” The history of the past 16 years refutes this, as does the content of the President’s peroration. Of course we’re giving them a blank check: that’s because the Afghan government only has such resources as we give to it. And since Trump is refusing to say when or even if we’re leaving, then our commitment is indeed potentially unlimited. Does he imagine our Afghan puppets, who are happily stealing us blind, don’t know this?

I can’t bear to go on cataloging the lies, the contradictions, the flip-flops – it pains me to even think about it, much less write about it. The “America First” foreign policy Trump promised during the campaign is just a memory, and his baffled supporters are left to contemplate the most brazen betrayal in modern American political history.

Yet there are some benefits, here, for anti-interventionists to reap, which may not be readily apparent. Because Trump’s supporters, who took seriously his anti-interventionist rhetoric, are now wondering what hit them. They had to go through this experience: betrayal can be enlightening. And we here at Antiwar.com are ready, willing, and able to enlighten them. That is, after all, what we’re about.

On step forward, two steps back – this is how progress, however agonizingly slow, is made.